June 29, 2010

YouTube talks Flash and HTML5

The folks at YouTube have put up an informative post about why, despite positive advances in what browsers support, “Adobe Flash provides the best platform for YouTube’s video distribution requirements.”

Of course, Flash is at death’s door, right? I suppose you didn’t hear that ESPN just streamed the US-Algeria World Cup match via Flash to “the largest U.S. audience ever for a sports event on the web,” with 1.1 million unique viewers. Through 14 days of World Cup coverage, 5 million viewers have watched the World Cup on ESPN3.com and consumed more than 9.2 million total hours. Somehow the Mac sites fail to notice these things. (Actually, that few people notice is a good thing: billions of times a month, Flash just works.)

John Gruber wrote the other day that “Hulu isn’t a Flash site, it’s a video site. Developers go where the users are.” Well sure, of course they do. Flash is a means to an end for Adobe, too, not the end unto itself.﻿

The folks at Hulu, like those at YouTube, are pragmatists. They’ll use whatever delivery mechanisms, presentation layers, etc. they need to reach the most eyeballs. On desktops Hulu prefers Flash, for the same reasons YouTube cites. (Even if more than 13% of the audience could play back H.264-format video on their desktops without using a plug-in, the browsers are lacking in content protection & other vital areas.) On mobile devices, Flash Player’s support for H.264 (and later VP8) makes it easy to use an alternate player to display the same video files.

I’m not saying all this to rile people up. I just get tired of all the uninformed rah-rah triumphalism out there, so I thought I’d help share some real-world perspectives.

Blog housekeeping: Notice anything different?

Answer: Hopefully not. We moved this blog over to a WordPress foundation yesterday, but there shouldn’t be any visible changes or disruptions, including to permalinks and RSS subscriptions. If you hit any snags, please let me know.

One somewhat minor, hopefully temporary problem is that comments listed on the right side of the main page no longer include an excerpt. I know that some of my teammates scan that list so that they can jump in with replies when needed, so we’ll try to fix the problem.

Thanks to the folks at blog consultancy Firmdot for making the move so painless.

Dyson’s bladeless Air Multiplier fans look pretty amazing, though claiming that they end the horrors of regular-fan “buffeting” seems like a stretch (selling the need right in the box, as we sometimes say).

A film shot & edited entirely on an iPhone

Amazingly, Apple of My Eye is a short movie shot and edited entirely on an iPhone 4:

I’m smitten, especially given that my little brother and I made our own little train video (embarrassingly crude by comparison, but helped immeasurably by Johnny Cash) on our parents’ iMac some years ago. I’m struck by the radical quality difference between a 2002-vintage consumer camera, and what David Lynch might call your effing telephone of today. [Via]